Finger-pointing in pier killing reveals no-fault government

Ashok Karki, Anju Paudel and Apar Karki pass by the Pier 14 memorial for Kathryn Steinle who was fatally shot on July 1 as she walked along the pier with her family.

Ashok Karki, Anju Paudel and Apar Karki pass by the Pier 14...

If you have never been to Pier 14 on the Embarcadero, it is just south of the Ferry Building, and thousands of people pass by it every year on the way to the ballpark.

Pier 14 is built on top of a breakwater. The pier is built for walking, and it reaches a long way out from the shore. It is designed to open up the waterfront to the public. The gray-green bay is at your feet and the San Francisco skyline is behind you, so you feel almost as if you have sailed away. It is one of the most beautiful places in the city.

And now it is one of the most tragic. Everybody knows the story. Kathryn Steinle, a 32-year-old woman who grew up in Pleasanton and lived in San Francisco, was out for a summer evening’s walk with her father on July 1. She had just taken a picture with her cell phone camera when she was shot and killed. The suspect is Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a felon with a long jail record who has been deported five times.

What happened that night was a nightmare — a random death, senseless, a gun apparently fired by a man from the fringes of life. He didn’t even know the woman.

What happened later should make you ashamed to be a San Franciscan. It showed what a dysfunctional city San Francisco has become. It is a city where everyone is responsible for everything and no one is responsible for anything.

It is pretty hard to understand how the cascade of mistakes and errors in judgment that led to Lopez-Sanchez being set free on the streets happened. But it turns out that Sheriff Ross Mikarimi’s deputies brought him to San Francisco from a federal prison in Victorville (San Bernardino County), out in the Southern California desert, on March 26.

Why the Sheriff’s Department imported a felon who had been deported five times had to do with a bench warrant on a 1995 marijuana charge. Who in this city is going to prosecute a low-grade criminal on a 20-year-old warrant? Not the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

Taking responsibility

But Mikarimi’s people held Lopez-Sanchez for three weeks and in April turned him loose onto the city’s streets. Although the immigration people had a detainer hold of Lopez-Sanchez, Mikarimi never bothered to notify them that he’d freed a man with a long history of violating immigration laws. San Francisco is a sanctuary city, after all.

The city let him walk. A young woman is dead, and he is accused of murder. Someone in elected leadership for the city and county of San Francisco should have stood up and taken responsibility for the tragedy. That would have been the correct and admirable thing to do.

Instead, they blamed each other. The mayor blamed the sheriff, the sheriff blamed the mayor. The progressive politicians who run the town blamed the immigration service, which, in turn blamed the city.

That’s the kind of city we have these days. It’s a new concept — no-fault government.

You have a tough time finding anyone in City Hall who will take responsibility for the city’s problems, which are legion and plain to see on nearly any street in San Francisco. And now we have the Pier 14 tragedy.

I think San Francisco made a terrible series of mistakes that resulted in Steinle’s death. The city should offer an official apology to her family. It’s our fault. We let this situation develop, and we should admit it.

But that won’t happen.

‘Missed beyond words’

Halfway down Pier 14 is what is left of a shrine to Steinle. There are a couple of wreaths and some flowers, all wilted and faded now. They may be gone by the time you read this. There is a picture of the woman, smiling as she was on the evening she was killed.

One of the bouquets has a tag on it: “Dearest Kate you are already missed beyond words.”